I took a holiday to Norway with my partner in mid July. It was a much needed break from the desperate job search. After Datadog rejected me after the final round of interview, I maniacally applied to every single job that I could find. I was so desperate that I even applied to a job that I was not qualified for nor interested in.
I recieved some phone calls from Spanish speaking recuiters asking things that are already included in the applications. I tried to answer their questions as patiently as I could. They promised to get back to me but never did.
After two weeks in Norway, I came back to Finland feeling utterly distracted. Soon afterwards was our wedding ceremony, families and friends came to visit. It did not help with getting back to focused work mode.
My Spanish residence permit was about to expire, which had been the major stress for this summer. I did not manage to get it renewed since the prospective job interviews did not fruit into offers. I had to leave Finland and fly to Spain the day before the expiration date.
The past few days were the hottest days in Spain. It was so hot that my laptop could not function properly. Alone on my own in my 50 square meters flat, thoughts would not leave me alone.
What am I doing with my life here?
I will never be able to get a job as a developer.
Maybe I should go back to uni to study a CS degree.
No I need to make money.
Coming to Spain was a terrible mistake.
I am wasting my life.
I wrote with pen and paper, trying to get the thoughts out of my head. I wrote about my fears, my worries, my hopes and dreams. I wrote about my past, my present and my future. I wrote about my family, my friends and my new husband.
It worked. Whatever that was materialized on paper magically disappeared in my head.
Today was the first day under 40 degrees. My laptop could somewhat function with loud fanning noise. Sometimes it would get stuck and I would have to close it and wait for it to cool down.
But I felt better. There are still voices in my head, but not as debilitating as before. I still think how arbitary the whole job search thing is. I got lucky once, entred the interview process and recieved an offer. I felt confident about my skills and feel good about myself as a person. Now after nearly 100 applications and not a single interview, I start to doubt myself, and this whole endeavour.
Nonethless, I feel functional again and ready to try hard.
I have 100% success rate progressing to the final round of interview, and 50% offer rate. The problem is to pass the resume screening and meet with the recuiter.
To not solely rely on luck, I need to improve my resume. I need to have more projects to put on it.
So I spent a few hours today researching the options out there.
Here are some of the things I found:
- Frontend Mentor. They offer designs for frontend devs to implement. It lacks of instruction, and community engagement. I passed on this one.
- Rviewer coding challenge. It's a platform to connect devs and companies through coding challengs. The commnity is active, and the instructions are comprehensive. I will start with this one.
- Coding challenges from John Crickett. I just love the challenges themselves. Very practical and they tackle fundemental CS problems.
Meanwhile, I want to keep accumulate experience and work in technical writing. I am currently working on a project with Open Beta, a community for open source projects. I am writing documentation for their projects. Coding blog is another way to keep my writing skills sharp.
Now I am busy with tasks again.